Cambodia: Hope from Despair

The flight to Thailand was seventeen hours; three hours later we were in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I never settled into the twelve-hour time difference. After returning home, it took more than two weeks for me to return to my time zone, but the trip has buoyed my spirit and touched my soul.

There were two parts to our experience: the sadness of the past and the hope of the future.

Everyone we met had a story of a family experience and loss during the Pol Pot regime, when the educated class was murdered and all the schools were destroyed, at the end of the 1970's .

Often, it was a tale of brothers. I was in Cambodia, in part, as a way of memorializing my brother, Barry, who died a year ago and who was an extraordinary high school math teacher in Buffalo. It was during the shiva period that I decided to pursue this project.

Our first guide, Sokha, lost his brother, Phoung, during the genocide there. We stood at the stupa building in front of twenty stories of human skulls and said the kaddish, remembering him. The parallels to the Holocaust touched our hearts, and there were tears in our eyes.

But there was also hope, so much hope. We saw the children learning and playing in schools like the one that we will sponsor. We played jump rope with them, gave them kazoos to create an impromptu band and backpacks filled with school supplies. The smiles on their faces were worth everything.

It was clear that education is the answer. Everyone is striving to learn and then to teach in an effort to slowly replace the educated class that was lost.

HERE'S HOW YOU CAN HELP:

1. SUPPORT THE BUILDING OF THE SCHOOL ITSELF with its computer center, wells and water filters, English and computer teacher and so much more.

2. SPONSOR ONE OF THE ORPHANS on the waiting list who can go to school only if his/her foster family receives $5 of rice each month for the ten years of classes ($600 per orphan – to save a child's future).